The sound you heard Thursday afternoon was a whole lot of broadcasters' jaws hitting the floor upon news of a first-ever local TV news paywall.
What a welcome thing it was; there's nothing like the sound of complacency being shattered.
Rich Boehne, The E.W. Scripps' Co.'s CEO and president, and Adam Symson, its chief digital officer, have made a gutsy play with their subscription model for Cincinnati ABC affiliate WCPO, which will take effect in January around the site's "premium" content. If nothing else, Boehne and Symson have forced their broadcast peers across the country to reassess their own digital platforms and ask a simple but important question: Is any of this stuff worth paying for?
What's particularly interesting is that the paywall move was preceded by a major content play, bulking up WCPO's bench to the tune of some 30 staffers, most of them editorial. They have been charged with producing some chewy content - deeper, more insightful business stories (Cincinnati is corporate HQ for more major players than one might think) and multimedia arts and lifestyle stories. WCPO's value proposition ultimately rests on how good this content actually is, and whether it really can meet or exceed the kind of journalistic headiness one more regularly expects from a daily newspaper, in this case the Gannett Co.-owned Cincinnati Enquirer.
Boehne acknowledges he has a formidable opponent in the Enquirer right out of the gate. But as the more-forward looking television and newspaper companies really start thinking about themselves as "media companies" rather than just giving the thought vacuous lip service, it's exactly the kind of attack he has to launch.
Local TV news is very good at marketing its content. It's far less consistent about making content worth marketing, particularly on the Web. Now Scripps has doubled down on this. First and foremost, it needs to deliver a product - every day - that Cincinnatians won't be able to see, hear or read anywhere else. If Scripps can do that and it inspires other TV newsrooms to push themselves to greater levels of intelligence, nuance and depth in their own work, then the whole news ecosystem will benefit.
After all, TV people all profess to know that content is king (God knows they say it enough). But judging by what they so often produce, how many really believe it?
WCPO's own newsroom has surely got its own internal battles ahead as well. It will be interesting to see how it avoids creating perilous silos or divisions among staffers competing to be taken seriously by their bosses and the audience. It seems ego clashes may be inevitable between those tasked with the stronger, paywall-worthy pieces and the freebie throwaway stories. Who wants to settle for credit for the canapés while somebody else can bask in the glory of the entrée?
Meanwhile from the outside, Scripps will likely be fending off incredulity and disdain from many other media companies for a while. Newspapers, for whom digital is widely seen as a lifeline to the future, certainly aren't going to take major Web pushback from a broadcaster lying down. It will be equally interesting to see what, if any, countermoves Gannett makes in Cincinnati to keep its own users from straying. Papers in other markets would do well to monitor developments there.
For those complacent broadcasters dismissive of digital's impact, those who simply can't believe that winter may come - and soon - as it did so disastrously for newspapers, Scripps' move may be something of an affront. They, too, would do well to note that everyone in media is just one or two disruptions away from an industry's equivalent of an atomic detonation.
It seems that what Scripps is doing in Cincinnati is more than just building a bomb shelter in case that happens. It's sitting down at a negotiating table with users, and hopefully soon advertisers, to head off a missile crisis that some major broadcasters don't believe could ever really happen, let alone is happening now.
With this move, there is no doubt that Scripps takes its digital platform gravely seriously. What we'll now see is if the wall it's building in Cincinnati is more than just between paying subscribers and less-committed users.
It might also be a wall between Scripps and the rest of the local TV broadcasting industry.
